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Originally Posted by cimt
People always go on about acting, stories and all that saying how amazing it is. It could be an age thing but I just can't get into it.
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As Hugh said.
You really have to see it in its own context. Nothing made in the mid 1960s is going to stand up to today’s standards. The best tv series today are technically better in many respects than what was made for cinema only a few years ago.
The original Star Trek series took a basic sci fi idea that has been done repeatedly in American film and tv but treated it in a radically new way. It made extremely bold cultural moves by putting a black woman in the regular cast, a Russian in charge of the ship’s operations and an angry southern racist in the sick bay who treats Uhura with equanimity and whose regular jibes aimed at his green blooded, pointy eared superior officer are always ineffective and increasingly ridiculous. It did this week in, week out, rarely treating it as a spectacle or making any of it the main subject of discourse. This is simply the future as Roddenberry saw it. His storytelling instead focused on issues like the rise of Nazism (Patterns of Force), the cold horror of submarine warfare (Balance of Terror, which also had a clever and important message against the othering of one’s enemy), and the sheer absurdity of slavery (The Gamesters of Triskelion).
If you want your tv to do your thinking for you then any old show will be difficult viewing, but if you can make the leap to treating classic shows as cultural artefacts and viewing them for what they were when they were made, then stuff like Star Trek is time well spent.
I’d venture to suggest that 50 years from now, TOS will still have a towering reputation, whereas Discovery, despite its state of the art production, will be a mere footnote ...